McClatchy, a subsidiary of the Chatham Asset Management hedge fund, began announcing major layoffs at newspapers across the country Thursday morning, including at the Lexington Herald-Leader.
The majority of the positions at the Herald-Leader were eliminated, with 13 journalists notified of being laid off, effective in two weeks. The eliminated positions include seven news reporters, three sports reporters, two visual journalists and one editor.
This currently leaves the Herald-Leader with just two reporters who cover city and state government.
A spokesperson for McClatchy and Herald-Leader’s new 27-year-old Executive Editor Jeremy Chisenhall did not reply to voicemails and emails seeking comment on the layoffs.
Among those laid off was enterprise reporter Alex Acquisto, a union guild representative for the newsroom. She shared an email from McClatchy management that said the layoffs were due to the company “reshaping its newsroom structure to more closely align resources with changing subscriber interests and the ways audiences engage with local news.”
“As part of this change, we are focusing resources on journalism that subscribers value and that can have the greatest impact in the communities we serve,” the email stated.
Not mentioned in the email was McClatchy’s push for artificial intelligence content to be published by its newspapers across the country since the beginning of this year. They launched a new tool that can summarize articles and create different versions for different audiences, which received heavy pushback from journalists in their newsrooms.
Acquisto, an award-winning and respected health and politics reporter at the Herald-Leader for the past seven years, said the layoffs are not just devastating for her talented and dedicated former colleagues, but also ”a loss that impacts Kentucky more broadly.”
“Journalism at its best holds power to account, sheds light on corruption, and equips us with necessary information to make the most informed decisions in our communities,” Acquisto said. “Gutting one of Kentucky's oldest and largest legacy newsrooms fully threatens our ability to do that and should be concerning to everyone.”
Among the Herald-Leader journalists who were laid off, five who posted about it on social media by that afternoon were high school sports reporter Jared Peck, Lexington city government reporter Adrian Paul Bryant, politics reporter Hannah Pinski, politics editor Tessa Duvall and business reporter Piper Hansen.
The Lexington Herald-Leader dates back to the late-1800s in various forms, but became its current merged entity in 1973 when it was purchased by Knight Ridder. It was sold to McClatchy in 2006, which went bankrupt in 2020. As part of that bankruptcy, McClatchy was sold to Chatham Asset Management, a large hedge fund that owns other media entities.
The Lexington Herald-Leader has won three Pulitzer Prizes over the past four decades.
Initial news reports have also shown widespread layoffs at other prominent McClatchy newspapers, including the Miami Herald, Kansas City Star and Charlotte Observer. The Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild announced on social media that 17 journalists were laid off at McClatchy newspapers in Idaho and Washington, amounting to a third of its unionized workers.
The board of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Louisville chapter issued a statement expressing solidarity and support for the laid off journalists.
"Today is a dark day for Kentucky communities that rely on a robust and fearless news media,” read the statement. “The loss of the experienced, talented and accomplished journalists at the Lexington Herald-Leader is a loss for all of us as citizens. These cuts should alarm all Kentuckians who want to know how their government operates and tax dollars are spent.”
*This story has been updated to reflect the number of journalists affected by layoffs at the Herald-Leader and include additional details.
